Works in Progress

 

 

I’m getting excited about this particular project; I have been thinking about how to structure my ideas since there is so much I have to say on my topic! The title of my talk is “Seeing Things: AI, Deep Fakes, Optics, and Vision, or How did the Enlightenment Predict our Dilemma?”

Here is my abstract:

We find ourselves at a moment in history when the fear of technology is palpable

everywhere. Debates about the value or danger of AI remind us of the early

enlightenment period, when often-heated arguments about the questionable

value and practicality of the inventions of machines designed to enhance vision

were challenged. How can we prove that what we are seeing is really there?

How far can we safely trust visual technology, especially considering the growing

presence of trickery like “deep fakes”? It is getting harder to tell the difference

between seeing things and “seeing things.” Naomi Klein writes: “hallucination

refers to the mysterious capacity of the human brain to perceive phenomena that

are not present, at least not in conventional, materialist terms […] by building

these large language models, and training them on everything that we humans

have written, said and represented visually, they are in the process of birthing an

animate intelligence on the cusp of sparking an evolutionary leap for our species.”

My paper will consider the ways in which 17-18th C experimental science, and the

emerging novel predicted this particularly human dilemma in which we now find

ourselves.